When the US swung a Russian election

An earlier victory: Boris Yeltsin gives a triumphant speech after government forces suppressed an attempted coup in August 1991 PHOTO/Wojtek Laski/Getty

The US intervened on the side of Boris Yeltsin in the Russian presidential election of 1996, offering advice and influence to help him secure the finance he needed.

It
is claimed that Russia now interferes in the political and social
affairs of most western countries. President Emmanuel Macron believes
the yellow vests movement is partly an attempt by a ‘foreign power’ to
destabilise France, and everyone knows he means Russia. Russia, it is
claimed, is behind the emergence of a major separatist movement in
Catalonia, the UK vote to leave the EU in 2016 and Donald Trump’s win in
the 2016 US presidential election. In the US, the idea that a foreign
power might be trying to influence political events in this way rouses
emotional reactions in the media and in government, and has led to an
inquiry into the possible connections between Trump, his election
campaign and Russia.

But, despite the outrage there, the US has itself not always been
respectful of the sovereignty of other states. Former US State
Department official Thomas Melia admits that ‘the CIA manipulated
elections in 1940s Italy and 1950s Germany — and beyond electoral
shenanigans, it also secretly helped overthrow elected leaders in Iran
and Guatemala in the 1950s’. He adds that these things happened during
the cold war, and that since the fall of the Berlin Wall, Russian and US
efforts to undermine foreign elections have not been ‘morally
equivalent’: the US is pursuing ‘programmes to strengthen democratic
processes in another country (without regard to specific electoral
outcomes)’; Russia ‘manipulate[s] another country’s election in order to
sow chaos, undermine public confidence in the political system, and
diminish a country’s social stability.’ Steven Hall, former chief of
Russian operations at the CIA, says comparing them ‘is like saying cops
and bad guys are the same because they both have guns’. The policies
intended to overthrow Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro illustrate
this view: the official line is that the US is promoting democracy,
while Russia is supporting an illiberal dictator (see [Venezuela’s missing (…)

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